This invention relates to lawn mower systems which include motor-driven, rotary blades and, at the same time, incorporate flailing trim cord units which extend laterally radially to the side of the lawn mower at a forwardly disposed angle so that the lawn mower can, while mowing a swath, readily trim the grass around trees and close to fixed structures such as buildings. The unit is particularly designed to be mounted on existing, walk behind, lawn mowers of either the self-propelled or push type, and is adaptable to a wide variety of lawn mowers which presently are sold in the market place, as an after market product.
Various prior art patents have sought to incorporate a flailing trim unit on various types of lawn mowers but, to my knowledge, no lawn mower manufacturer has at this time marketed a lawn mower with a trim unit in place. Among the proposed designs are those exemplified in the following patents, which I incorporate herein by reference:
______________________________________ 3,236,037 Porterfield 3,531,922 Hansen 3,782,085 Parker et al 4,170,099 Owens 4,453,372 Remer 4,896,488 Duncan et al 4,949,536 Neufeld .sup. 244,666 Wegenaur (Austria) 5,040,360 Meehleder ______________________________________
One of the prior art mechanisms is the present inventor's system for adapting a rotary trimmer disk with flailing cords to a riding lawn mower having two or three, side by side, rotary blades driven by a centrally mounted engine, which is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,040,360. A drive pulley was mounted on one of the blade shafts and drove a rotary flail trimmer via a belt which was disengaged automatically when the flail unit was moved from a horizontal trimming position to a vertically raised inoperative position by an operator-controlled mechanism.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,782,085 another horizontal trim unit is disclosed as mounted on what is believed to be a multi-blade riding lawn mower but the trim unit operates continuously and cannot be moved to and from an inoperative position. In this patent the flailing trim unit is disabled by removing the drive belt.